Archives for June 2012

These fish sculptures made from plastic bottles were apparently an officially-sanctioned part of the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) that took place in Brazil last week. (via: Unconsumption) The artist who designed the installation remains somewhat of an internet mystery. While most of the reaction has been very positive…

The gorgeous fish glitter with reflection of the sun’s rays, juxtaposed against a beautiful backdrop of Rio’s mountains. Each sparkles with blue hues from the plastic, but are also illuminated at night, in warm blues and reds from LED and projected lights. The oversized installations welcome visitors to wander through and around their shimmering scales…

The beautiful sculptures can be enjoyed on the idyllic Botafogo Beach for the duration of the Rio +20 conference.

… there was some dissenting opinion about the worthiness of this project. The breakdown of the glue-gunned bottle sculptures that occurred later in the week was part of a much harsher, contrasting critique by Kari Koch of the Portland Occupier:

This was a demonstration of how clever marketing and a pretty face can create lovely images that briefly cover the destruction of industry, but ultimately falls apart and leaves trash everywhere.

The water bottles are falling all over the beach and the bay at Botafogo Beach is wretched with pollutants and sewage.

The Green Economy wants us to think that our world can be preserved and sustained by continuing to create giant artifacts, plastic constructions, and endless growth. The truth is that we cannot continue to have endless growth. We cannot sustain our world and our lives by producing more and allowing corporate interests to buy off their pollution by owning a forest or by creating public art.

Instead of building fish, corporations need to clean up their messes, leave the public areas to the people who know how to protect them, and ultimately those corporations (and the plastic bottles they create) need to be dismantled.

The same system that created this mess cannot possibly understand how to build an alternative that sustains our world, our communities, and our lives.

This fish of Botafogo will soon be nothing more than plastic particles in trash bags…

Such well designed packaging and so direct a way of communicating the essential fishiness of the product, makes me wonder why I never noticed before that there was something vaguely fish-like about the shape of a standard, toothpaste-style collapsible tube. (via: Sara Strand)

Another three seafood tubes from Ikea are less zoomorphic, more diagrammatic in their labeling. Similar to the cocktail-flavored toothpaste tubes that we looked at last year, there are implications to which way the fish is pointing.

To me, it would make sense to always have the fish facing in the direction of the cap. If there’s a fish on the other side, I would want to flop it so that it also faced towards the cap. With the black fish laying the eggs, however, I could see some justification for pointing that fish away from the cap so that its egg-laying end was more closely aligned to where the caviar would be emerging from the tube.

Ikea, for some reason, has chosen to do exactly the opposite of these things. But maybe I’m just being crabby. All in all it’s a very effective package design.

(One more thing about fish packaging, designed to remind us of real fish…) [Read more…]

Following up on yesterday’s suggestion that Coca-Cola (or other consumer packaged goods companies) might use trademark law to try and prevent unflattering images of their empty packaging being publicly exhibited… here are some more images that contradict the brand narrative.

Felix von der Weppen’s “Studio Dirt on a Bottle of Coke” is probably no less slanderous from Coca-Cola’s point of view than SodaStream’s public exhibit of discarded soda bottles. SodaStream’s message is arguably more of a threat to Coca-Cola’s bottom line, but if they were were to successfully make SodaStream “cease and desist” why wouldn’t they also view von der Weppen’s dirty Coke bottle as an affront to their brand equity?

It funny that we’re again pairing Coca-Cola and Mrs. Butterworth. (see: Molotov Branding) I happened to find the photo of a dusty Mrs. Butterworth bottle in a blog post about an abandoned farm house in northern Missouri. Since the title of that post was Mrs. Butterworth… You’re So Dirty, it just seemed to fit. And then I found another photo with a whole group of dusty Mrs. Butterworth bottles…

Dusty packaging, of course, is not desirable for a brand. Grocers and supermarket clerks have traditionally made an effort to dust slower moving products precisely so they do not look old and shopworn. Are images like this bad for Mrs. Butterworth’s brand equity? Probably not, but if Pinnacle Foods thought so, could they use their Mrs. Butterworth trademark to prevent the publication of such photos?

A recent legal kerfuffle between Coca-Cola and SodaStream (a manufacturer of home soda making systems and concentrated flavors) might be sign of things to come.

SodaStream has been using displays of discarded soda bottles as way of dramatizing their own ecologically smaller footprint. The displays contain the discarded bottles of various brands, Cola-Cola as well as Pepsi, but it was Coke that took the bait.

The display at the Oliver Tambo Airport in Johannesburg angered Coca-Cola South Africa. A lawyer on behalf of the company sent a letter to SodaStream demanding that it “cease and desist” the display, contending that it was slanderous, and that Coca-Cola has copyright to its brand, logo, and beverage bottles.

SodaStream’s position is, “You sold the product, and the sale terminates these rights. Besides, we collected the bottles from the garbage. If the cans in the garbage are yours, go and collect them from all over the world.”

As consumers we still assume that, by purchasing a product we then own the object. Yes, digital products have muddied the water a bit. (You own the CD but not the music on it.) What Coca-Cola is doing is a little different: using their trademark right to try and prevent their empty packaging from being displayed in an unflattering light. But it’s just the latest manifestation of trend that’s been building for a while now.

A case now heading to the Supreme Court, “Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.” also involves a new broader interpretation of trademark and product ownership.

We are working to defend a long-standing principle known as the “First-Sale Doctrine.” This common-sense rule gives us the right to sell most property we own, but big businesses have been trying to chip away at out our rights in the courts. If the Supreme Court supports the lower court’s decision, we won’t really “own” anything if any part of it was made in a different country. And practically anything you own — from your iPod to your house — could have been made abroad, in whole or in part.

Similar to the old joke about renting (rather than buying) beer, there seems to be an increasing legal momentum for the idea that we may not fully possess our possessions. Trademark law may turn out to be promising tool for companies that would like to exert more control over their products after they are ostensibly “sold.”

As for Coke versus SodaStream it’s important to note that it’s a dispute between two business entities with competing interests. Since corporations are not people, it’s not as if Coke is depriving people of their right to do as they please with their empty Coke bottles. At least, not yet.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see more examples of this type of corporate push back against unauthorized uses of trademark packaging. I’ve speculated before about how often brand-name products are mentioned in negative news stories —“Baby found in Timberland Box”— but figured there wasn’t much a company could do about it. That may be changing. Corporations are getting more powerful. If a sleeping giant can be roused to anger by a relatively small company like SodaStream, there may come a time when an artist like Paul McCarthy, who has exhibited filthy and unappetizing name brand products, will be sued for slander.

“…a simple device for culturing a large diversity of microorganisms. Invented by Sergei Winogradsky.”

A lot of Winogradsky columns are made from empty bottles.

The column is constructed in a tall clear glass or plastic container. Tall wide mouth bottles are probably best, but 2 L soda bottles are easy to obtain in large numbers and will serve the purpose. Virtually any roughly cylindrical container will serve, even vessels as diverse as olive jars, wine bottles and twenty-liter carboys.

Looked at another way, this is an unauthorized branding refresh, similar to the Coca-Cola Dead Sea redesign we posted earlier this month. As with any redesigned packaging, we need to see before and after pictures—the food package as it appeared when sold and then again after becoming a mud-filled ecosystem.

(The Mrs. Butterworth bottle is easy to recognize, but I had to do some digging to identify some of the other brands.)

Ray Wigger’s Winogradsy dry roasted peanut jar on the right appears to be the same container as the Wegman’s dry roasted peanuts jar on the left.

…as overtly elegant and stylish as my converted peanut jar is… many other types of capped containers work, too. I’ve experimented, both in the lab and in my rather labbish home, with mayonnaise jars, graduated cylinders, and even plastic mustard dispensers. The main requirement for all is that their surfaces are transparent, unobscured with labels, and not tinted. After all, you want a clear view of the ecosystem as it develops.

It’s been too long since we’ve featured some polyhedral structural packaging. Christina Sicoli’s hexagonal “Hatch” structure made me curious if I could find any other interesting examples of hexagonal-shaped packages for chocolate. Here we have three, each designed by a different designer. (Or designers.)

The videos of the Varanasi Research Group’s proposed LiquiGlide™ coating for condiment bottles and jars have been widely viewed for the past month or so. Mostly it’s the video of ketchup rapidly pouring that you see on other package design blogs. So just to be different we’re going with the mustard here.

Condiments may sound like a narrow focus for a group of MIT engineers, but not when you consider the impact it could have on food waste and the packaging industry. “It’s funny: Everyone is always like, ‘Why bottles? What’s the big deal?’ But then you tell them the market for bottles—just the sauces alone is a $17 billion market,” Smith [MIT PhD candidate Dave Smith] says. “And if all those bottles had our coating, we estimate that we could save about one million tons of food from being thrown out every year.”

…One of the most significant challenges his team faced was making sure the coating was food safe, meaning his team could only work with materials the FDA had approved. “We had a limited amount of materials to pick from,” Smith says. “I can’t say what they are, but we’ve patented the hell out of it.”

Solving this problem, particularly with mustard, might have saved Leonardo DiCaprio’s “Toby” from a viscous beating by Robert DeNiro’s “Dwight” in the 1993 “This Boy’s Life.” Or not. From what I recall of Dwight’s character, even a nanopartical of mustard would have been enough cause for a beating. (See: Mustard Jar Fight Scene)

In addition to having “patented the hell out of it,” the MIT team has also trademarked their invention’s new brand name. Don’t much like their current brand logo, however.

The name “LiquiGlide” has also been used in other product categories, namely eyeliner and car stereo speakers…

“All Audiotex auto speakers feature Liqui-Glide, the rare and costly magnetic fluid that improves performance by dissipating heat from the voice coil, thus increasing power handling capability. Which means you can really crank them up and they won’t break down. But Liqui-Glide also reduces distortion and aging which means you may very well get more miles out of Audiotex speakers than you do out of your car.”